I couldn’t agree more today - in the context of my studies on the news industry - with this statement made by Clay Shirky in a elucidating article published here.

“Having one kind of institution do most of the reporting for most communities in the US seemed like a great idea right up until it seemed like a single point of failure. As that failure spreads, the news ecosystem isn’t just getting more chaotic, we need it to be more chaotic, because we need multiple competing approaches. It isn’t newspapers we should be worrying about, but news, and there are many more ways of getting and reporting the news that we haven’t tried than that we have.”

In the British Journalism Review, Steven Barnett, Communication Professor at the University of Westminster and special advisor to the House of Lords 2007/08 committee on  News and Media Ownership,advanced that recent changes in media ownership of broadcast news should be taken seriously. In the next few years, news media in the UK might be only provided by a single broadcaster – a single individual.

Here’s some excerpts of the article:

“News Corp’s announcement in August of its intended bid triggered an almost unprecedented show of unity from its competitors: the Telegraph Group, Guardian Media Group, Trinity Mirror and the Mail newspapers joined forces with the Director-General of the BBC and the chief executives of Channel 4 and BT to call on business secretary Vince Cable to intervene on the grounds that the deal “could have serious and far-reaching consequences for media plurality”.

As Sky’s vocal critics have suggested, there are plenty of economic grounds for blocking the deal:

the merged company’s ability to cross subsidise loss-making newspapers;

the scope for sophisticated bundling strategies which will aggregate material from print and broadcast (e.g. a Times newspaper/Sky subscription);

economies in exchanging editorial copy between screen and print (for example, using Sky News video and interviews in online newspaper reports);

and yet more pressure exerted on the hardpressed regulator Ofcom to maintain a level playing-field in the face of such a dominant corporate presence.

(…)

Here, Sky’s apologists feel on safe ground: there should be no cause for concern about a reduction in journalistic plurality, they argue, because the UK’s impartiality regime prohibits any editorial intervention. Moreover, why on earth would anyone want to intervene in a news channel which is demonstrably well regarded in the industry and has won a hatful of broadcast journalism awards?”

This is an extremely interesting and well argued article.  In my mind, it shows how globalisation impacts the changes in media organisation that might affect in turn the way in which historically the Brits have presented the news: as plural and impartial. Although more research to look at the long term impact on the content would shed light on the actual effect that ownership changes have on the news content, this article appears to be quite convincing – raising some of the issues that are currently debated in the UK news.

Big news developments for NBC News and ITV News.

Later this month, Rohit Kachroo will act as Africa correspondent for both NBC and ITV.

ITV News Middle East reporter John Ray will additionally act as correspondent for both networks.

“ITV News’ partnership with NBC comes after the UK broadcaster opened a new bureau in Dubai and shuffled its foreign correspondents, reducing its presence in Africa.”

Foreign correspondents are important actors in the newsmaking process. Does that mean that the foreign news content of NBC and ITV News will eventually converge?

ITV will continue its journalistic activities in the African region - but will the content that emerges from the activities appeal more to US or UK viewers?